|
Attaginus
Attaginus (Greek: ), son of Phrynon, was one of the leading Theban oligarchs, who betrayed their city to Xerxes I on the Second Persian invasion of Greece, and took an active part in favour of the Persians. He invited Mardonius and 50 of the noblest Persians in his army to a splendid banquet at Thebes, shortly before the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC. After the battle, the Greeks marched against Thebes, and required Attaginos and Timegenidas, and other members of the Persian party, to be delivered up to them. This was at first refused; but, after the city had been besieged for twenty days, his fellow-citizens determined to comply with the demands of the Greeks. On these terms they made an agreement, but Attaginus escaped from the town. His sons were seized, but Pausanias of Sparta held them free of guilt, saying that the sons were not accessory to the treason. The rest of traitors were put to death at Corinth.Herodotus Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek hist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient Thebes (Boeotia)
Thebes (; ell, Θήβα, ''Thíva'' ; grc, Θῆβαι, ''Thêbai'' .) is a city in Boeotia, Central Greece. It played an important role in Greek myths, as the site of the stories of Cadmus, Oedipus, Dionysus, Heracles and others. Archaeological excavations in and around Thebes have revealed a Mycenaean settlement and clay tablets written in the Linear B script, indicating the importance of the site in the Bronze Age. Thebes was the largest city of the ancient region of Boeotia and was the leader of the Boeotian confederacy. It was a major rival of ancient Athens, and sided with the Persians during the 480 BC invasion under Xerxes I. Theban forces under the command of Epaminondas ended Spartan hegemony at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, with the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite military unit of male lovers celebrated as instrumental there. Macedonia would rise in power at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, bringing decisive victory to Philip II over an alliance of Thebe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xerxes I
Xerxes I ( peo, 𐎧𐏁𐎹𐎠𐎼𐏁𐎠 ; grc-gre, Ξέρξης ; – August 465 BC), commonly known as Xerxes the Great, was the fourth King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, ruling from 486 to 465 BC. He was the son and successor of Darius the Great () and his mother was Atossa, a daughter of Cyrus the Great (), the founder of the Achaemenid empire. Like his father, he ruled the empire at its territorial peak. He ruled from 486 BC until his assassination in 465 BC at the hands of Artabanus, the commander of the royal bodyguard. Xerxes I is notable in Western history for his invasion of Greece in 480 BC. His forces temporarily overran mainland Greece north of the Isthmus of Corinth until losses at Salamis and Plataea a year later reversed these gains and ended the second invasion decisively. However, Xerxes successfully crushed revolts in Egypt and Babylon. Xerxes also oversaw the completion of various construction projects at Susa and Persepolis. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Second Persian Invasion Of Greece
The second Persian invasion of Greece (480–479 BC) occurred during the Greco-Persian Wars, as King Xerxes I of Persia sought to conquer all of Greece. The invasion was a direct, if delayed, response to the defeat of the first Persian invasion of Greece (492–490 BC) at the Battle of Marathon, which ended Darius I's attempts to subjugate Greece. After Darius's death, his son Xerxes spent several years planning for the second invasion, mustering an enormous army and navy. The History of Athens, Athenians and Spartans led the Greek resistance. About a tenth of the Greek city-states joined the 'Allied' effort; most remained neutral or submitted to Xerxes. The invasion began in spring 480 BC, when the Persian army crossed the Hellespont and marched through Thrace and Macedon to Thessaly. The Persian advance was blocked at the pass of Thermopylae by a small Allied force under King Leonidas I of Sparta; simultaneously, the Persian fleet was blocked by an Allied fleet at the straits ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mardonius (general)
Mardonius ( peo, 𐎶𐎼𐎯𐎢𐎴𐎡𐎹 ; grc-gre, Μαρδόνιος ; died 479 BC) was a leading Persian military commander during the Persian Wars with Greece in the early 5th century BC who died at the Battle of Plataea. Early years Mardonius was the son of Gobryas, a Persian nobleman who had assisted the Achaemenid prince Darius when he claimed the throne. The alliance between the new king and his friend was cemented by diplomatic marriages: Darius married Gobryas' daughter, and Gobryas married Darius' sister. Furthermore, Mardonius married Darius' daughter Artozostra. Thus, Darius the Great was simultaneously Mardonius' uncle, father-in-law, and half-brother-in-law. Persian Wars with the Greeks First Persian invasion of Greece Darius appointed Mardonius as one of his generals and, after the Ionian Revolt, sent him in 492 BC to punish the Greek city-state of Athens for assisting the Ionians. On his way to Athens, he used his army in the Ionian cities to depose th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orchomenus (Boeotia)
Orchomenus ( grc, Ὀρχομενός ''Orchomenos''), the setting for many early Greek myths, is best known today as a rich archaeological site in Boeotia, Greece, that was inhabited from the Neolithic through the Hellenistic periods. It is often referred to as " Minyan Orchomenus", to distinguish it from a later city of the same name in Arcadia. Ancient history According to the founding myth of Orchomenos, its royal dynasty was established by the Minyans, who had followed their eponymous leader Minyas from coastal Thessaly to settle the site. In the Bronze Age, during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, Orchomenos became a rich and important centre of civilisation in Mycenaean Greece and a rival to Thebes. The palace with its frescoed walls and the great beehive tomb show the power of Orchomenos in Mycenaean Greece. A massive hydraulic undertaking drained the marshes of Lake Kopaïs, making it a rich agricultural area. Like many sites around the Aegean Sea, Orcho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Athenaeus
Athenaeus of Naucratis (; grc, Ἀθήναιος ὁ Nαυκρατίτης or Nαυκράτιος, ''Athēnaios Naukratitēs'' or ''Naukratios''; la, Athenaeus Naucratita) was a Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourishing about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD. The ''Suda'' says only that he lived in the times of Marcus Aurelius, but the contempt with which he speaks of Commodus, who died in 192, shows that he survived that emperor. He was a contemporary of Adrantus. Several of his publications are lost, but the fifteen-volume '' Deipnosophistae'' mostly survives. Publications Athenaeus himself states that he was the author of a treatise on the ''thratta'', a kind of fish mentioned by Archippus and other comic poets, and of a history of the Syrian kings. Both works are lost. The ''Deipnosophistae'' The '' Deipnosophistae'', which means "dinner-table philosophers", survives in fifteen books. The first two books, and parts of the third, eleventh and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Battle Of Plataea
The Battle of Plataea was the final land battle during the second Persian invasion of Greece. It took place in 479 BC near the city of Plataea in Boeotia, and was fought between an alliance of the Greek city-states (including Sparta, Athens, Corinth and Megara), and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I (allied with Greece's Boeotians, Thessalians, and Macedonians). The previous year the Persian invasion force, led by the Persian king in person, had scored victories at the battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium and conquered Thessaly, Phocis, Boeotia, Euboea and Attica. However, at the ensuing Battle of Salamis, the allied Greek navy had won an unlikely but decisive victory, preventing the conquest of the Peloponnesus. Xerxes then retreated with much of his army, leaving his general Mardonius to finish off the Greeks the following year. In the summer of 479 BC the Greeks assembled a huge (by ancient standards) army and marched out of the Peloponnesus. The Persians retreated t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pausanias (geographer)
Pausanias ( /pɔːˈseɪniəs/; grc-gre, Παυσανίας; c. 110 – c. 180) was a Greek traveler and geographer of the second century AD. He is famous for his ''Description of Greece'' (, ), a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his firsthand observations. ''Description of Greece'' provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology. Biography Not much is known about Pausanias apart from what historians can piece together from his own writing. However, it is mostly certain that he was born c. 110 AD into a Greek family and was probably a native of Lydia in Asia Minor. From c. 150 until his death in 180, Pausanias travelled through the mainland of Greece, writing about various monuments, sacred spaces, and significant geographical sites along the way. In writing ''Description of Greece'', Pausanias sought to put together a lasting written account of "all things Greek", or ''panta ta hellenika''. Living in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medism
In ancient Greece, medism ( el, μηδισμός, ''medismos'') was the imitation of, sympathizing with, collaboration with, or siding with Persians. The ethnonym "Mede" was often used by the Greeks of the Persians although, strictly speaking, the Medes were a different Iranian people, subject to the Persians. It was not until the 470s that the Greeks began to refer to "Persians", with Aeschylus' play ''The Persians'' in 472 being an early example of this. Medism was considered a ''faux pas'', even a crime, in many ancient Greek city-states. However, it does not seem to have been specifically criminalised. For instance, in Athens suspected Medisers were charged with treason. The evidence suggests that this was true of other Greek city-states too: in Teos, for instance, a law from the classical period provided that anyone who betrayed the city should be punished by death, but failed to distinguish betrayal to the Persians from betrayal to any other group. Themistocles the Athe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pausanias (general)
Pausanias ( grc-gre, Παυσανίας; died c. 477 BC) was a Spartan regent and a general. In 479 BC, as a leader of the Hellenic League's combined land forces, Pausanias won a pivotal victory in the Battle of Plataea ending the Second Persian invasion of Greece. One year after the victories over the Persians and the Persians' allies, Pausanias fell under suspicion of conspiring with the Persian king, Xerxes I to betray Greeks and died in 477 BC in Sparta starved to death by fellow citizens. What is known of his life is largely according to Thucydides' ''History of the Peloponnesian War'', Diodorus' ''Bibliotheca historica'' and a handful of other classical sources. Early life Pausanias like all Spartan citizens (Spartiate), would have gone through intense training from the age of seven and was required to be a regular soldier until the age of thirty. Pausanias was from the royal house of the Agiads. Yet this did not exempt him from going through the same training as every o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Histories (Herodotus)
The ''Histories'' ( el, Ἱστορίαι, ; also known as ''The History'') of Herodotus is considered the founding work of history in Western literature. Written around 430 BC in the Ionic dialect of classical Greek, ''The Histories'' serves as a record of the ancient traditions, politics, geography, and clashes of various cultures that were known in Greece, Western Asia and Northern Africa at that time. Although not a fully impartial record, it remains one of the West's most important sources regarding these affairs. Moreover, it established the genre and study of history in the Western world (despite the existence of historical records and chronicles beforehand). ''The'' ''Histories'' also stands as one of the earliest accounts of the rise of the Persian Empire, as well as the events and causes of the Greco-Persian Wars between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states in the 5th century BC. Herodotus portrays the conflict as one between the forces of slavery (the Pers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient Thebans
Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history to as far as late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the Sumerian cuneiform script. Ancient history covers all continents inhabited by humans in the period 3000 BCAD 500. The three-age system periodizes ancient history into the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, with recorded history generally considered to begin with the Bronze Age. The start and end of the three ages varies between world regions. In many regions the Bronze Age is generally considered to begin a few centuries prior to 3000 BC, while the end of the Iron Age varies from the early first millennium BC in some regions to the late first millennium AD in others. During the time period of ancient history, the world population was already exponentially increasing due to the Neolithic Revolution, which was in full progress. While in 10,000 BC, the world population stood ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
